There is no secret that one of the most sound way to become a “billionaire” or a wealthy person is to start your own business. Most millionaires and billionaires that are “self made” have earned their money by running successful businesses.

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I’m not saying that you should run a business to become “rich”, but if you want financial freedom then you should try to use your skills and spare time to investigate whether or not starting a business is a viable option for you.

If you are a student, then you have a golden opportunity of becoming an entrepreneur. Students often have little to no financial dependencies holding them back. You don’t need to earn X-thousands of dollars in order to survive. However, if you are more experienced and have worked in corporations for a longer period of time, you might have a better success rate even though your burn rate is much higher.

I have been an entrepreneur my entire life, I know how it is to live on next to nothing. But I was able to do that by:

I worked as a customer service representative in a VoIP company for two years, the worst job I ever had..

Asking for help

When I ran out of cash, I turned to family to help me out. Even though this isn’t a long term solution, it can be a solution in some dire situations.

If you already have a 9 to 5 job, that’s no excuse to not start and experiment with startup ideas. You do not have to “go all in” a new startup.

My best advice that I can ever give you if you are looking to start a business is to:

START WITH EARNING MONEY.

If you have little or zero startup capital, you have to focus on something that will generate income right away. Never launch a startup that needs heavy investments to create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – if you do not have cash to “throw away”. Startups that need a lot of investments to be able to get a sellable product or service could easily fail and will run out of cash faster than you would think. Some startups are in constant need of new investments and you really do not want that pressure on yourself as a founder (believe me, I’ve been there).

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Good business ideas where you could immediately earn money is to start consulting private persons or businesses in a field where you are a specialist. Maybe it’s in accounting, financial services, art, music, photography, design, or HR.

You should try and find one simple business case that only need one sentence to be able to explain what you are doing.

Consultants can bill by the hour. If you do not have any clients in mind, you could start offering your services for free or at a low rate to start building up your client base. Happy clients are the best marketing of your business.

Do i need a team?

Everyone tells you that you need a talented team to make a successful business. That is both tru and untrue. If you start small, you should focus on your own qualities and what you can do to earn money without including other founders. The more founders you have, the more money you have to make to ensure profitability.

In the lecture below about “How to Start a Startup” by Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz, they focus mostly on doing a “software startup” like Facebook. That is not necessary what you should do, and most of their ideas and thoughts are for creating the next “unicorn“. Still they have some really good suggestions that you should be aware of:

If you haven’t done a startup before, I would suggest to do something really small but with high quality. If you are able to generate a secondary income you can gradually shift your focus towards your startup and hopefully within 6 or 12 months be able to be fully invested. At that time you might be able to include other people and start building your own team (and even start other ventures with the cashflow you are generating from your first startup).

Be passionate about your startup

This part is so important. You have to be passionate about your startup and what your startup is trying to solve for your clients or customers. If you are not passionate, you won’t be able to create a quality product or service. I strongly advice you to go for your passion, and not leap into a business idea that might generate cash faster. You need passion to be able to stick to your plan and to be able to thrive in your own business. If it’s boring, then you will have a boring life.

I started CryptoCoinsNews.com because I have a strong passion about the decentralized currency. I started it on my own and wrote daily articles for 6 months without any income. On the 6th month I was able to get my first advertiser and could add a few freelance journalists to the project. Then the traffic started to increase gradually and we got more advertisers and I had enough cashflow to increase the team. Now CCN is the 2nd largest Bitcoin news source in the world with a great team of 21 journalists and one editor.

I will write more about entrepreneurship in the coming weeks and months. Please contact me or leave a comment below if you are wondering about doing your own startup and need some advice.

Dmitriy Lavrov is a professional trader, technical analyst and money manager with 10 years of trading experience. He covers Forex, Commodities and Cryptocurrencies. He is among the top 10 most Read More

Jonas Borchgrevink

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Jonas Borchgrevink is the founder of Hacked.com and CryptoCoinsNews.com. He is a serial entrepreneur, trader and investor. He shares his own personal journey on Hacked.com. // -- Discuss and ask Read More

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